Liquor Brand Ambassadors: Party Kings Or Endangered Species?

How’s this for a dream job: Travel the world on a hefty expense account in a bespoke suit, pouring cocktails and telling fascinating (often pre-scripted) stories to audiences who feel honored to sip your drinks and hear you talk.

That is one way you could describe the job of the alcohol brand ambassador. These ladies and gents are an increasingly important part of the way liquor brands interact with their clientele. The gig may represent a decade-long career or year-long prize resulting a from a bartending contest. As a rule, male or female, liquor brand ambassadors have to be great talkers, and they’re typically pretty hot.

Though the size and role of the job vary greatly from brand to brand and company to company, in general they are what the name implies: ambassadors working back and forth among producers, sales staff, bartenders and us, the drinkers. They’re not your typical salespeople — they’re the physical embodiment of the brand, meant to “bring the product to life” in strategic locations around the world.

But there’s a downside to any dream. A huge chunk of the job is a grind (living out of a suitcase, 18-hour days, spreadsheets, quotas, expense reports), and there is such a thing as too much liquor. So which is it, fantasy life or grueling liver killer?

"It is a glamorous job," says Billy Melnyk, Bacardi's director of influential accounts. "But it's also a very tough job. It really requires unique, exceptional people, and we find them."

You may not have known it at the time, but you’ve almost certainly encountered a brand ambassador. Each time you order off a cocktail menu featuring branded ingredients, each time a bartender gives you the detailed backstory on a specific product, whenever you've read a drinking trend article, like here or here, or watched Stephen Colbert or Hoda Kotb learn a new cocktail from a dashing bartender type, you've been impacted by the benevolent god-hand of the almighty brand ambassador.

The Upside: Party Kings

"People joke about the day Simon Ford left Pernod Ricard; they mourn the loss of his expense account," laughs Cointreau ambassador Kyle Ford (no relation to Simon, but he is married to Tanqueray ambassador Rachel Ford). "It's one of the most tangible benefits of the job. You're able to treat bartenders, media, guests. I'm already dreading the day when I have to pull out my personal credit card to pay for food and drink."

Charlotte Voisey

In the past seven or eight years, with the rise of craft cocktail culture and a renewed interest in quality spirits, we’ve entered into the golden age of the brand ambassador. People like Charlotte Voisey, Simon Ford, Angus Winchester and Jamie Gordon have attained something approaching celebrity status in the bar and cocktail worlds. They are generally regarded as having been instrumental in helping define the contemporary drinking culture.

"My first role as ambassador only allowed me to reach out to the five or six people in New York who had craft cocktail bars," says Simon Ford, who started out working at a wine shop before being picked up by Seagram's, then Plymouth Gin, and then Pernod Ricard (which owns Plymouth, Beefeater, Absolut and a lot of other brands). He recently left the company to help launch The 86 Co., a portfolio of bartender-friendly spirits. "Now you walk into the job and there are a thousand people to talk to around the country."